How to talk about 'trans-girl' in my son's class.

@LivelyCritic this kid is 6. 6!!! Get a grip.

Ooo scolding here too.

OP is safeguarding. You are virtue signalling.

I have no time for the ghoulish allies.

Educate yourself to become a better human & stop being transphobic is what you should do. And if you can’t do that for self-less reasons, here’s a selfish one: your son’s generation is going to be the most accepting of transgender people yet, if you don’t support him to understand it now, he’ll learn that from somewhere else & ultimately it’ll impact your relationship & his trust in you.

Yes, it is very unkind to the children to force them to lie about the reality they can see with their own eyes. Maybe there would even be consequences for them if they didn’t lie, in this upside down ideological conformity the school seems to be imposing.

They are being taught that lying is a good thing. And, telling the truth is bad. Not an insult, just the observable truth as you’d be able to with any other boy.

Are all the schools in Ireland indoctrinating children in this new anti scientific religion now? If Christian schools are also teaching it, how does it align with the do not lie commandment? The young earth creationists in Northern Ireland don’t seem to be comparatively more anti science now either. The belief that people can change sex is even more ridiculous. And the forcing of such rubbish on children is nasty and abusive.

I know it's been said before, but if this child had anorexia, the school would never in a million years be telling the other children that they must agree with the child and affirm how 'fat' they were - and encourage them in eating as little as possible.

After all, telling them that they're actually unhealthily thin and that they're believing something that most clearly isn't not true - and should seek help with their mental health - would probably also upset them, wouldn't it?

If this came up again I would be inclined to ask them how mindful and respectful they’re being of all the children who are now expected to collude in this child’s delusion and basically lie every time they interact with him.

So sorry this is happening but thank goodness your son has you as his mum!

I would be clear your son he is to:

• leave this boy alone / not to interact with him
• if he cant say something nice say nothing blah blah.

Beyond that you are right. He is a boy.
A boy with long hair and dresses but a boy nonetheless and I wouldnt be pretending anything else to my child.

I remembered that as soon as I'd posted! Sorry OP. I blame the menopause!

I still think that the equal respect for different beliefs is the way to go. Point out the inequality of what they are doing.

I live in a country which I complain about plenty because it's pretty much stuck in the fifties as far as racism and sexism go, but when I read things like this I thank my lucky stars! My daughter has had a friend since nursery, and when she was four she declared she would rather be a boy. Her parents are very laid back and don't really conform to traditional gender roles, so went along with it as far as haircut and clothing went. Apart from that she was just left to get on with it, played what she wanted with who she wanted. All the kids knew she wanted to be a boy but there was never any suggestion she actually was one. She's now a totally well-adjusted 12 year old who no longer says she wants to be a boy and generally chooses to hang out with the girls, although she's not into wearing dresses. i dread to think what might have happened had she been in a different country.

But the OP is in Ireland, so these points wouldn't apply.

If you go the 'different beliefs' route you can also point to Forstater and state it is discriminatory to not allow someone's sex realist beliefs. Which they will be doing (discriminating against your family on the basis of belief) if they force your son to use wrong-sex pronouns or pretend a boy is a girl i.e. force gender ideology unscientific beliefs upon him and you. It's also anti safeguarding, anti Cass and anti the draft schools guidance.

As a school, an organisation, they are bound by EA2010 which you as individuals are not.

If I had to leave a child in a school pushing this abusive rubbish, I'd go with "I respect your right to hold your beliefs and I hope that you equally respect my right to hold my beliefs. Our beliefs might not be the same but we both are free to hold our beliefs ourselves, but neither of us can impose our beliefs on the other because that is not respectful" or something more 7 year old friendly. But basically this. My 8 year old could learn this verbatim and I'd go over it as much as needed. And myself tell the teachers this 500x with a link to the 'emotional abuse' bit in KCSIE until they gave up trying to gaslight my child.

It's galling because obviously biological reality is obvious, empirically provable fact which gender identity is not. But it should make it more possible to navigate school without having to mess up your child's English language learning with junk like 'preferred pronouns' and without undermining their safety.

It would be tempting to tell the school that your parental pronouns are 'yourhighness / yourexcellency' if they don't respect your son's right to believe in material reality and observation and seek to impose someone else's beliefs upon him through force of punishment if he doesn't comply. Which would be clearly breaching KCISE and abusive.

You could claim that through 'educating' yourself about gender identity you've discovered your inner gender identity is royalty gender, or something. The reflection gender is also good where your pronouns reflect whoever the last person you talked to is. Lots of potential for bigoted misgendering and complaints to Governors there.

Agreed, but from kid to kid it's a nice thing to say. It's good for kids to learn they can have different opinions and still be cordial to one another.

What if you don’t respect them though? I don’t respect people who gaslight me and expect me to go along with their lies to appease them. Pretending a child can change sex crosses a line in my opinion.

I'd maybe start teaching to say 'i don't agree with you, but I respect you. And that's ok, people don't have to agree on everything'.

I would be looking at other schools if the school can't treat your son's observation of material reality as equally valid compared to another child's inner belief that he is something different to what he materially is.

It's not ok to tell your child he's wrong, or that he's being unkind by stating neutral facts because he's not. If you look in the article I linked it was very traumatic for the little girls lied to by adults - it undermined their entire trust of adults in schools. And why wouldn't it? Of course it would.

I'm not saying it's the same as Santa in terms of equivalence of belief, I'm saying that's how you treat it in conversation with your kid, which is what the OP asked. I get all the outrage, but in practical terms this is a kid in an ET school in Ireland, so from a pragmatic perspective this is what she needs to do. That doesn't stop lobbying politicians, etc for change, but this isn't the case where a principled stand will go down well. The religious schools are fully bought into LGBTQ, all families, etc. as well if my other kid's Catholic school is anything to go by.

Shocked that the school is allowing it tbh. 6 year old children can't be trans.

I'd not be brainwashing my kid.

'Son, sometimes people are a bit mental. Just try to be nice'.

ET has fall for this nonsense hook, line and sinker. I'm the absence of moral frameworks, they seem to latch on to what's fashionable.

Honestly OP, I'd be tempted to move him, if I could.

Yes, I do think the Santa example is different. The corollary would be if they op’s son had to affirm someone in his school as really being Santa, if they claimed to be.

Children are constantly telling other children Santa isn't real. You have a conversation with your child that it's just like religion, we all believe different things and they have to decide what they believe. And children mostly believe based on experience so if they get a load of unexplained presents every Xmas that their parents say are from Santa then they're more likely to believe.

And the school doesn't call the kids who don't believe in Santa bigots who are 'discriminating' against all the other children if they don't pretend to believe and expect them to change their language to use Santa pronouns all day every day. At most they might have a quick word saying 'you're upsetting the little ones, maybe just avoid talking to them about it at all'.

Children can SEE biological sex.

And at the end of the day Santa isn't as important as biological sex. No-one's actually seeing Santa in school on a daily basis, unlike biological sex differences. Santa doesn't matter for safeguarding in the same way. Santa doesn't require us all to change the way we speak on a daily basis and lie on a daily basis.

It's an interesting mind experiment, but IMO thinking about how schools address Santa actually underlines the extreme abuse being foisted on children because of gender ideology.

There is research on differences in brain development between the sexes. This link is a few years out of date but gives an indication of the type of studies.
https://stanmed.stanford.edu/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different/
All you can look at is an average presentation, there will always be an overlap.

The school won’t have information about the brain of the child in question anyway (as opposed to how they were socialised). It’s just their way of explaining things. I think they’re doing the child a disservice.